39
that the Washington Consensus is supposed to have foreclosed, by rendering free markets and
free trade as the epitome of civilization.
Despite the promise of reform, there is much ambiguity in Smith’s picture of the material
well being of the lowest orders in a commercial society. On the one hand, Smith asserts again
and again that a commercial society produces greater material well being for common people
than previous forms of society. Indeed, Smith sets this as a key criterion by which contemporary
society should be judged:
No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the
members are poor and miserable. It is but equity, besides, that they who feed, cloath and
lodge the whole body of the people, should have such a share of the produce of their won
labour as to be themselves tolerably well fed, cloathed and lodged.
136
He promises earlier in the text that, in a “well-governed society,” the “universal opulence
extends itself to the lowest ranks of the people.”
137
In his discussion of wages, he explains that
wages cannot fall below the level of subsistence (though, we should note, the mechanism
involves higher infant mortality rates among the poor), and should rise above subsistence with
vibrant growth.
138
On the other hand, such comparisons are not always favorable to a commerical society.
First, Smith’s comparisons of the common laborer and the chieftain of the savages do not deny
that the lowest order fall well behind the most advantaged in society, even to the point of
“indigence.” As Smith puts it: “Wherever these is great property, there is great inequality. For
one very rich man, there much be at least five hundred poor, and the affluence of the few
supposes the indigence of the many.”
139
Not surprisingly, Smith, in his Stoic fashion, turns this
136
Smith, Wealth of Nations, p. 88 [I. viii].
137
Ibid., p. 15 [I.i].
138
Ibid., I. viii, the chapter titled “Of the Wages of Labor.”
139
Ibid., p. 232 [V.i.b]
Convention